Friday, April 22, 2011

Tweaking Scia Engineer 3D Scene

What is making Scia Engineer unique comparing to most of other FEM or analysis programs is very powerful and easy to use 3D Scene control.

Scia Engineer 3D control supports OpenGL instructions provided by graphic card. There are lot of different graphic card types, therefore using specific instruction might cause compatibility issues. Default settings on Scia Engineer are very conservative – most of the graphic details are set to low precision, and Scia Engineer purposefully switches of all the OpenGL effects provided by graphic card.

However users can already use benefits of their powerful hardware and override these defaults by settings provided by their graphic card. Settings can be different for various graphic card manufacturer (ATI or Nvidia). On above screenshots you can see settings for Nvidia Quadro 4000.

Other options which might be worth to test on your specific hardware are font settings. You might see from the screenshot that I changed main fonts to SegoeUI, which is MS Windows default system font. I also changed font type to truetype with best available smoothing.

The last 2 dialogs which are significantly affecting 3D Scene quality are Geometry/Graphics and Advanced graphic setup. With this you might be little bit more careful, as they are really affecting geometry precisions as well.

So after those adjustment, what is the result ? Take look on couple of screenshots. Note that Scia Engineer is fully responsive and fast on manipulations, but I am using really powerful HP desktop computer. Take closer look on anti-aliased edges.